iam currently just writing a little script which loooks up ip addresses in a specfic location... so what i will have is something like this.. Enter ip adresss:**************...then it goes to a the location looks up the address and connects to the specifc port to connect to the server.. any ideas?:)

Sorry, but I'm a bit unclear exactly what you mean. What's the difference between a location and and IP address?

What protocol are you going to be speaking across the link? There are high-level Perl modules for most popular protocol (HTTP, FTP, NNTP, etc) and if you're using your own protocol then I recommend writing your own module wrapper using something like IO::Socket.